Chocolate by Sarah Moss (ebook voice reader .TXT) 📕

liking for chocolate was a result of dependence on native cooks and therefore native cuisine. The missionaries’ attempt to fill the social and cultural roles of Aztec priests meant that clerics were also plied with chocolate as they went about their work. In order to govern, the Spanish had to integrate, and part of that integration was the development of a taste for chocolate.

This explains the association of chocolate with native women, but not the insistence that Spanish women took to the drink faster and more enthusiastically than Spanish men. In the mid-seventeenth century the English Dominican Thomas Gage, who celebrated his arrival in Vera Cruz with ‘a Cup of the Indian drink called chocolate’, told a story of a bishop and the Spanish Catholic women of Chiapas:

This bishop was (as all the rest are there) somewhat covetous; but otherwise a man of temperate life and conversation, very zealous to reforme whatsoever abuses committed in the Church, which cost him his life before I departed from Chiapa to Guatemala. The women of thatCity it seems pretend much weaknesse and squeamishnesse of stomack, which they say is so great, that they are not able to continue in the Church while a Masse is briefly hudled over, much lesse while a solemn high Masse (as they call it) is sung, and a Sermon preached, unlesse they drinke a cup of hot Chocolatte, and eat a bit of sweetmeats to strengthen their stomacke. For this purpose it was much used by them to make their maids bring to them to the Church in the middle of Masse or Sermon a cup of Chocolatte, which could not be done to all, or most of them without a great confusion and interrupting both Masse and Sermon. The Bishop perceiving this abuse and having given faire warning for the omitting of it, but all without amendment, thought fit to fixe in writing upon the Churches dores an excommunication against all such as should presume at the time of service to eat or drinke within the Church.

Gage and the Prior of the Cathedral tried to calm the bishop, Don Bernardino de Salazar, ‘alleadging the custome of the Countrey, the weakenesse of the sex whom it most concerned ... the contempt that might ensue from them unto his person, and many inconveniencies which might follow to the breeding of an uproar in the church and in the City.’ But the bishop was not to be moved, and after there was ‘one day such an uproare in the Cathedrall, that many swords were drawn against the Priests and Prebends’, the women ‘resolved to forsake the Cathedrall’, taking with them all the donations and contributions upon which the bishop and his staff depended. In the following month, the bishop fell ill and returned to his cloister, where ‘physitians were sent for far and neere, who all with joynt opinion agreed that the Bishop was poysoned.’ The bishop died, andGage blamed ‘a Gentlewoman ... who was noted to be somewhat too familiar with one of the Bishops Pages’, for having ‘such a cup of Chocolatte to be ministred by the Page which poysoned him who so rigorously had forbidden Chocolatte to be drunk in the Church.’

This anecdote is sometimes offered as evidence for the addictive properties of chocolate, illustrating that women would choose eternal damnation rather than go without chocolate for a few hours, but in context it is clear that the chocolate is a weapon in a battle between a zealous reforming bishop recently arrived from Spain and the upper classes of a well-established Creole community. Gage goes on to recount his own negotiations with the ‘gentlewoman’ who sent him chocolate, which he interpreted as thanks for teaching her son Latin and then realised was an unwanted love-offering. ‘The women of this City ... have learned from the Devill many enticing lessons and baits to draw poor soules to sinne and damnation; and if they cannot have their wills, they wil surely work revenge either by Chocolatte or Conserves, or some faire present.’ Gage is not writing here about the irresistibility of chocolate but about Spanish suspicion of Creole women and their appetites.

Chocolate-drinking spread steadily through Central American society in the centuries following conquest, and by the late seventeenth century was so widespread that the cultural meanings of cacao multiplied, particularly in relation to gender. Martha Few’s work on ‘Chocolate, Sex and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeeth and Early-Eighteenth Century Guatemala’ describes a sequence of women accused of using chocolate in poisoning and witchcraft, showing both how strong the association with women of all classes had become and how common the beverage was (the equivalent of the Victorian fear of women who slipped something into their husbands’ tea). Juan de Fuentes’s allegation to the Inquisition in late seventeenth-century Guatemala that his wife Cecilia had used ‘spells and curses’ against him provides a neat example of these connections:

His wife treats him not as a husband but as a servant. He lights the fire in the kitchen, he boils the water, he mixes the chocolate and heats the food ... and he gets up very early every morning to do this while his wife stays in bed and sleeps until very late. And when his wife wakes, he brings her chocolate so she can drink it after she dresses ... in this way his wife has turned him into a coward, and all this cannot be a natural thing.

Chocolate, then, was already connected with bad women, women who indulge themselves with mornings in bed instead of attending to their domestic duties. The association between chocolate and feminine ‘naughtiness’, luxury and self-indulgence that will blossom in modern advertising is already planted, interestingly in the context of a society which, like our own, assumes chocolate to be consumed by most people on most days. Chocolate, in this reading, represents a threatening kind of female eating even as it becomes ubiquitous.

Chocolate was also associated with another kind of moral lapse. Catholics in early modern Europe were